Thesis Examination Committee

Abstract

Indoor Wi-Fi propagation model characterization is crucial to Wi-Fi access points deployment. The current method to do the characterization involves frequent human interactions and sample-taking, causing a high labor intensity and low estimation efficiency. We propose to use multiple robot agents to replace humans in the characterization task. We formulate the propagation model parameter estimation problem and the robots path-planning problem into an online Markov Decision Process (MDP) & Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) problem. Online MDP is solved with online value iteration while the near optimal MLE solutions are found with Particle Swarm Optimization tool. Multi-robot platform free workers from intensive labor effort without losing measurement accuracy. The online decision making strategy and parameters estimation allows the Wi-Fi propagation model characterization process to be much faster with equal or better performance.